Many B2B marketers fail to offer website visitors and social media encounters compelling reasons to engage. The biggest mistake in online B2B marketing is limiting CTAs to “contact us.” So often a website visitor is conducting research. They are simply not ready to “contact you.” But, if you offer a B2B website visitor something compelling that aligns with their stage in the buying process, they will often accept your offer. Traditionally, a popular B2B CTA has been a white paper download. This can be very effective, but it’s so common that it must be compelling. White paper CTAs with an image and a benefit statement usually perform best. E-books can perform even better than white papers.

Consider LinkedIn a professional networking environment. Use common sense. Do NOT be salesey or spammy. Be useful. Offer value to your network. You can find opportunities if you engage with your network and if you mine the data to uncover intelligence about people and companies. Just be wise about how you use the data. Consider the parallel common sense rule of offline networking at an event. You wouldn’t approach a group of people and slap your business card at them and give them a sales pitch. LinkedIn is all about making connections and building online relationships through professional credibility. LinkedIn can be a very valuable online tool for business development if you use it wisely regardless if you're in B2B or B2C.

Paul and his colleagues at Avaya defined the mission of all the social marketing to be: Powerful, Authentic, Personal Interaction. They defined several objectives including demonstrating thought leadership, building brand awareness, increasing demand, and producing sales leads. Since Avaya had already started doing many tactics on the social web, the decided to consolidate their strategy across four platforms: The Avaya corporate blog, customer forum, a few TW profiles and the Avaya Facebook Fan page.